1/10/2008 @ 2:00PM

The Spice Of Life

Liberian fried peppers, anti-aging chili eye cream, hot sauces with monikers like Naga Sabi Bomb, Butt Burner and Widow Maker are just a few of the offerings at the National Fiery Foods Show in Albuquerque, N.M. This year, more than 13,000 people will gather to wear chili-shaped hats, collect pepper paraphernalia and bravely sample a rainbow spectrum of hot sauces, including those made from Bhut Jolokia, the world’s hottest pepper, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Despite the event’s popularity, America’s foremost hot sauce dynasty doesn’t bother to attend the annual hot sauce affair. To the McIlhenny family, pepper sauce is no niche market aimed at a cult of “chiliheads,” but a global, $250-million-a-year business with sustained profit margins of 25% or more. In McIlhenny’s Gold: How a Louisiana Family Built The Tabasco Empire, journalist Jeffrey Rothfeder traces Tabasco sauce from the backwaters of a post-Civil War Louisiana bayou to a brand name classifying a whole market sector: If you need to blow your nose, you think “Kleenex.” If you want to liven up a bland gumbo, you think “Tabasco.”

In this telling of the McIlhenny story, Rothfeder is trying to separate the sizzle from the steak. According to family’s version of the story, in 1863, with Union troops on their tail, the McIlhenny clan ditched their plantation island and fled to Texas. Two years later, the family returned to find their antebellum lives destroyed, their Dixie dollars worthless and their slaves emancipated. Enter the chili pepper. The family legend says Edmund McIlhenny discovered some Tabasco chili peppers he’d planted before the war flourishing in his overgrown garden. McIlhenny mashed the peppers into a little concoction he called Tabasco. McIlhenny lore would have you believe it’s an antebellum Horatio Alger story–but there’s more to it than that.

Rothfeder breaks down the creation mythology of the McIlhennys’ lionized patriarchs from the get-go. It seems another fellow, Maunsel White, had been growing the same Tabasco chilies and making a similar chili, vinegar and salt mash at another nearby Louisiana plantation for decades before McIlhenny ventured into his luxuriant garden.

Because the Tabasco brand spans so much of America’s industrialized history, the pepper sauce’s journey tells us as much about the evolution of American industry as it does about the specifics of taste bud-piquing pepper sauce. In 1906, a year after Congress passed the Trademark Act, the McIlhennys trademarked the name “Tabasco,” despite its being a place name–which would normally preclude it from trademarking–and a type of chili used in numerous hot sauce products at the turn of the century. Rothfeder suggests that Edmund’s son’s friendship with President Theodore Roosevelt may have greased the wheels at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Nepotism or not, the McIlhenny lawyers have, since then, kept the postal service busy carrying threatening letters to any and all companies or individuals using the word Tabasco. Take Sam Wiener, a New York artist who, in 1979, took the pseudonym “Evangeline Tabasco,” only to be hounded back to Wiener by Tabasco lawyers.

In the 1980s, the U.S. government was busy pouring money and military might into Latin America in an effort to create allies during the Cold War. Tabasco was among the companies spurred south by American-friendly governments, cheap labor and abundant land. In the case of Tabasco, a dearth of Avery Island peppers pushed operations into countries like Honduras, Brazil, Columbia, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Though Rothfeder does a commendable job tracking down former executives, retired Tabasco workers and mutinous McIlhennys, his lack of access to any McIlhennys active in the company does hurt. Rotherfeder does not always paint an appetizing picture of Tabasco’s rise to ascendancy. These days, Tabasco is nearly as ubiquitous as butter and as quotidian as salt and pepper–and this book chronicles that progression in equal parts business story and Faulknerian family saga.